1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to caching of security attributes, and particularly to dynamic cache lookup based on dynamic data.
2. Description of Related Art
Caching is an important technique that improves the efficiency of many tasks performed in a computer system. Among other areas, caching has been applied to security, particularly authentication. In a distributed security system, it is sometimes expensive to create or collect the authentication data. Collection of such data can require remote network calls to a user registry or security services to request the necessary data. This is improved by caching the authentication data for a user so that the authentication data need not be recreated or collected for the “same login,” aka a login with the same authentication data.
WebSphere™ application server provides caching for authentication data with lookup based on static authentication information, such as the hash (username, password) or accessID (constant unique identifier for a given user). In this case, from a security perspective, the uniqueness of a “login user” of a session is not only based on the static data, but rather it is based on some security attributes that depend on the authentication process.
This way of authentication associates uniqueness of a logon user with security attributes, particularly with static security data. Hence, if two sessions are logged in with the same accessID, the same security attributes will have to apply to both. It would therefore be beneficial to provide a way for the same accessID to be logged into the system multiple simultaneous times, but allowing different security attributes.